Thanks for setting up these forums Rachel! I know how powerful good forums can be - I started an email provider in 1999 called FastMail (still going strong at www.fastmail.com) and we had our own forum on www.emaildiscussions.com . IIRC, I had over 25,000 posts there! I hope that we can create a community here that can lead to a lot of interesting and friendly conversations.

I'm Jeremy, Rachel's co-founder and the main instructor for this course. I'm originally from Melbourne (pronounced "mel-bun", not "mel-born"!), Australia, and have lived in SF for around 5 years. I moved here when we got funding for an earlier startup, Kaggle, and the VCs were keen to have us in the bay area. I'm very glad to have moved, because I've found SF an exciting and stimulating area.

As well as Kaggle and FastMail, I've also founded a couple of other startups - Enlitic, and Optimal Decisions Group (now part of Lexis-Nexis), and before that I was in management consulting.

I'm passionate about the idea that deep learning can help to solve a lot of society's most important problems, and believe that that won't happen well unless we make it much more accessible. I hope that this course and community will help to make that happen.

Jeremy Howard talks in a Twitter feed about his bad experiences with communities (Reddit):

Quote:

This is a great question. During the last 25+ years on Compuserve, Usenet, mailing lists, various forums, and now Twitter, I've posted tens of thousands of times and seen forums come and go. The successful technical discussions were not what I expected... 1/9

In his 4th tweet he made a reference to EMD:

Quote:

That ancient forum is still active, after well over a decade. It's called EmailDiscussions, and it has strict rules and very proactive moderation. The moderation bothered me for a while, but I now think it was critical to its success 4/9 http://www.emaildiscussions.com/announcement.php?f=6